What If Diversity Is Our Weakness?

A reader left this comment on the “What’s The Matter With Utah?” thread. I think it’s really thought-provoking and challenging, but he posted it under his real name, and I’m worried that if I approve it, it will set him up to be attacked. Reader, if you are sure that you want me to approve it, let me know and I will. But I want to throw the comment out there for discussion, because the issues the reader brings up are real, and difficult:

The patterns displayed by Trump’s performance are ‘confusing’ only because they challenge core beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum about race and diversity. Conservatives are straining to deny the obvious because Trumps’s success confirms a long-denied narrative about the racial roots of the Southern realignment, as has been reiterated in at least a half-dozen op-eds a week. Occam’s Razor would suggest that the story, if a bit simplified, is the cleanest way to explain why an identity-politics candidate is performing well in the Old Confederacy states. Trump is winning in part because these are the same people who are losers in the global wage-arbitration realignment, to places like China, but that’s just one more factor that reinforces their central racialist schema for understanding the world.

But the Left is also reluctant to acknowledge one important element of that narrative: The Putnam hypothesis that racial polarization increases with social contact. This denial is a deeply pernicious epistemological flaw, grounded in an incorrect understanding of human nature. A central dogma of post-religious society is that provincialism and xenophobia are a product of ignorance, and that when people come into contact with one another, they inevitably become more tolerant. But this conviction is a consequence of statistical anomalies, and is not at all representative of broader human nature.

Left-leaning members of the media believe that precisely because it works so well for them. When they encounter minorities in the fields of law, journalism, or politics, those minorities are almost always the handful of successful exceptions to the broader trend of poverty, lack of education, and social malaise. If the only blacks (Hispanics, etc) you encounter are the ones who are disproportionately successful, then it reinforces your conviction in the irrationality of racism, and the necessary existence of deeply perverse moral defects in anyone who doesn’t assent to the “obvious truth” of diversity as a source of social cohesion and institutional success.

Outside those enclaves, it’s easier to see the consequences of building policy around those outliers. Skimming off the handful of successful minorities and concentrating them (whether through affirmative action or by legitimate personal success) into a handful of wealthy multi-ethnic enclaves is itself a reason why many black communities are deprived of the social capital and networking needed to escape poverty. But worse, it tends to create a world where the points of contact between poor whites and poor blacks are entirely negative, and reinforce negative stereotypes in a way that falls far closer to the concept of “rational racism” (in the classic “taxi driver who avoids certain neighborhoods” sense) than the Leftist-orthodox rainbows-and-unicorns celebration of personal experiences as a remedy for bigotry. (This doctrine has only been reinforced by the outcome of the SSM debate, where the communities where homosexuals can comfortably be “out” are the ones where you’d expect to find lots of economically successful and charismatic public figures, in fields like sports and entertainment.)

I live in a poor part of town, about 50% black, 30% Hispanic, and 20% white. All my neighbors are black, and relatively poor. The house next to mine has three junker cars in the back yard, slowly rusting. At night (including last night!), I often hear gunshots and screaming fights between belligerent family members who use all manner of violent-sounding profanity to describe what they’d like to do to one another. God save the fatherless kids in the middle of those fights. Last month a repo-man came to our door asking about the working hours of our neighbor, in an attempt to intercept her; we told him that, so far as we can tell, she is unemployed and lives off benefits. Her children occasionally drop by with grandkids to avail themselves of free babysitting while they smoke pot. The kids seem nice enough, sometimes, but I won’t let my girls go over to play for fear of their parents’ drugs, booze, and guns. It’s hard to sleep, between the gunshots and the foundation-shaking ‘music’ that cars charitably broadcast to the neighborhood. Last fall one of the peach trees I’d been carefully tending was ripped up when a criminal fleeing the police was chased through my yard, eventually being tackled and cuffed on the back of my car after everyone in my house woke up to bullhorn-loud demands to “drop your weapon.”

To me, the existence of a Trump who loses Utah makes perfect sense. It’s hard to sustain anti-racism in the face of a world of social pathology that makes so many parts of the racist narrative feel so deeply rational and appealing. As a lower-elementary kid, I don’t remember ever comprehending the idea of racial prejudice when I attended a private school where there were three black kids, all of them from the families of wealthy politicians. They were so talented, and friendly, and, aside from skin color, so much like us! But when I transferred into the public school system in middle school, and I had to listen to sexually violent “suck my dick, bitch!” rap lyrics on the school bus every day, suddenly I didn’t like black kids nearly as much as I did before. I still said all the right things in public about racial tolerance, but they felt more than a little fake. The black kids were mean. They swore. They fought. They made fun of me. They talked about hurting other people with guns and knives, and it was scary. Despite what my parents said, I felt that the value of being in a “more integrated” public school was all a sham — and having a Trump-esque figure in my circle of friends willing to admit that sham in public would have felt liberating. It was making me vastly less tolerant and open-minded than the unnaturally white private school I had attended before.

Two years later, I started listening to a lot of Rush Limbaugh, and the guy really made sense to me.

I’m aware that tendency cuts both ways. I’m sure there are things that my black neighbors dislike about my house and family — My dog barks too much! I have messy-looking vegetable gardens in the front yard! I’m a dorky-looking nebbish on a bicycle! — and I’m sure they have to work to avoid letting that personal frustration evolve into some broader critique of “white people” in general. All the same socio-economic self-sortings that make working-class white racism feel justified against blacks (or Hispanics) are increasingly likely to cut the other way, as white working-class communities dissolve into meth addiction and out-of-wedlock births and are perceived as dysfunctional by “minorities” that are (in the case of Hispanics particularly) passing them by. Most of the best maintained houses in my neighborhood are owned by Mexicans with a talent for working in construction, and I’m sure they hate living next to poor white trash families in homes with rotting frames without the resources to escape to the exurbs, and who are trapped here pulling down their property values.

But what liberal wants to go up on live TV and admit the obvious truth, that segregation and demographic homogeneity are a powerful force for racial harmony, the best antidote for Trumpian racial resentment, and the easiest way to create the kind of social cohesion that allows us to have a generous Scandinavian welfare state? What conservative wants to tell successful blacks in the position of a Ben Carson or a Clarence Thomas that they should have maintained their identity in poor black neighborhoods, full of selfish (or even well-meaning) friends and relatives who will try to drag them back down into poverty? Which StopTrump secularist organization wants to publicly advocate the sort of strong religiously-motivated homogeneity of Mormon choirs, as an alternative to the “celebrating our diversity” whitewashing of cultural suicide by an African-American artistic community that went from Jazz at Carnegie Hall to the bitches-and-hos hip-hop that blares from every window-rattling car that drives past my front yard?

If Trump is defeated by normal mechanisms, then states like Utah will deserve much of the credit — and that means that the voluntary racial segregation that arose through Mormon migration and discrimination (until recently, by explicit doctrine!) will deserve part of that credit. But no one will dare to say that out loud.

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.

“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”

The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable — but discomfort, it turns out, isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”

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177 Responses to What If Diversity Is Our Weakness?

I’m reminded of advice to a friend from his divorce lawyer: “This is happening whether you want it to or not. This is happening whether you think it’s a good idea or not. Deal with it.”
Diversity is a fact in America. I noticed when walking down the street in both San Francisco and New York that I was one of the few white people present. Even at work here in Kansas, I am sometimes the only white person there. America is on its way to being a minority-majority country, whether you like it or not, whether you think it’s a good idea or not. It’s happening.
Most of the immigrants I work with have been here for many years. They are citizens, and good ones. Their children were born here, and are birthright citizens. And the children, more often than not, are marrying white native-born Americans, who are turned off by the immigrant hate. This is happening whether white Americans want it or not, and they need to deal with it.

Been busy with Spring Break activities, so I’m late to this thread, but a couple observations:

1) That there are higher levels of trust within a tribe, as opposed to among several, isn’t exactly earth-shattering. It’s interesting to see experimental evidence of such. But as other commenters have asked, what of it? There are many good reasons why Jim Crow, or anything like it, should not be reinstated.

2) As others have noted as well, it is rather uncharitable of someone to encounter upper-class professional blacks in one context, lower-class folks from the ghetto in another–and conclude that the latter are representative of the African-American experience–what blacks are “really” like–while the former are outliers. Obviously, most people here would get annoyed if Honey Boo Boo was held as an exemplar of white people, or even of rural whites–and indeed, many of the folks here who speak the most ill of blacks seem the most offended when nasty jokes are made about “flyover country”. Perhaps people should be evaluated simply on their own merits?

3) Diversity seems to be shorthand for “racial diversity”–indeed, in the US skin color is a predominant social sorter. Go to many parts of the Middle East, or to Brazil, and you’ll see the diaspora of three continents mingling together (and breeding together) with far less concern over melanin content. Of course these societies have other social sorting criteria–religion being the biggest by far in the Middle East–but not every place is the US, and not every place has our history.

They want to live by other Han, and there are real estate brokers that even specialize in moving Chinese to Irvine. Contrary, of course, to federal ‘equal housing’ law, but ‘ethnic’ discrimination of this kind never gets investigated or charged.

Being married to a Chinese realtor, albeit not one licensed in the State of California, I should comment. Real estate listings may not contain discriminatory language (“nice white neighborhood”), and realtors may not attempt to steer clients based on race or national origin (“you don’t want to live there, it’s full of blacks” or “I think this neighborhood over here would be better for your kind”). Realtors also may not refuse business because they don’t like the race of the client. OTOH, Realtors are free to practice their trade in languages other than English (including seeking out a predominantly ethnic clientele) and to specialize in certain communities and neighborhoods (“nobody knows Irvine like Stan Wong!”). A Realtor whose business specialty is Irving-bound Chinese isn’t breaking any laws unless he refuses to show white clients the same properties he shows Chinese ones, etc. Likewise, a Realtor is within her rights to only accept listings from Beverly Hills, or Compton, or any other neighborhood you might name.

Civil rights and fair housing laws are part of the training real estate agents receive.

“Two, if peeople just naturally want to live among their own kind, why do the white folk keep having to make first, laws, and then, all kinds of underhanded rules (down to the present day),to keep the black folks from moving in next door?”

If people don’t naturally want to live among their own kind, why does the federal government have to pour millions into enforcement of ‘anti-discrimination’ law enforcement, equal housing law, etc.

I propose that ‘diversity’ is, in fact, not a real issue at all, but it’s a cover (at least as typically used in the corporate press)

The rich want to open the borders to the overpopulated third-world, so that wages can be driven down to the level of Mexico or Vietnam and the rich can get even richer. But that doesn’t sound very good. So instead of talking about forced population increases and the effects on wages, rents, etc., let’s instead call it ‘diversity’ and claim that anyone opposed to jamming a billion people into this nation before the turn of the century hates people specifically, i.e., the only reason to oppose massive population increases is racism.

Another interesting thing about immigration. George Borjas at the Kennedy School of Government has just released a major study of the wage effects of immigration, legal and illegal. The findings have two components: immigration yields a surplus of something like 35 billion, likely due to lower costs of finished goods and other mystical economic efficiencies. But there has been a redistribution of wealth on the order of 403 billion a year to employers due to wage depression and profit taking. The present value of that is massive, something like 20 trillion at a 2% risk free rate of return (which we are nowhere near by the way). There has also been gdp growth due to immigration, almost all accruing to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages.

This dilineates one of the most economically plausible mechanisms of wealth separation in our country. Moreover, it is a place of common ground for both right and left. The right is understandably concerned about potential cultural destruction due to balkanization of immigrant communities (and I would add, current immigration policies significantly damage ladders of opportunity as well, as you can always fill spots up the promotion ladder with an incompetent but cheap foreigner), while the left would like more equitable distribution of wealth. Both are served by a more restrained and effectively enforced immigration regime.

But here is the kicker, the left is moving quickly to an ideology of multicultural rent seeking. Let’s see how receptive they are when those two priorities collide.

This morning at Easter sunrise service, I heard an announcement that the oldest member of the church had died at the age of 102. Her family name is Polish, probably by marriage, but her faith is closely associated with German ethnicity. Of course Poles and Germans were all mixed up all over eastern Europe until Hitler and Stalin, with some inspiration from Woodrow Wilson, decided they should be separated on opposite lines of a clear border. Maybe they were going to build a wall too. Hey, there’s a thought, Ronald Reagan saying “Mr. Trump, tear down this wall.” Reagan did used to talk about how he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t celebrate Cinquo de Mayo — which incidentally is celebrated more in the USA than in Mexico, where is it a local holiday around Pueblo, where the battle was fought, but not a national holiday.

Anyway, the lady who is 102 years old… her church is now overwhelmingly filled with people of African descent, has its own gospel choir and praise dance ensemble, still practices the traditional liturgy. I expect a fair number will be at the funeral.

The real reason to embrace diversity is not that it is politically correct, but that if you try to sort people out into neatly delineated homogenized communities, osmosis will eventually undo your work. Along the way, either your head will spin, or a few million people will be slaughtered, or both.

It may be human nature to cling to one’s own kind, but it is also natural osmosis that undoes that sort of exclusivity. Greeks just gotta sail the ocean, Lebanese and Chinese just gotta trade, Catherine just needs German technical skills on the Volga, etc. etc. etc. And then people are always falling in love across those lines… which is why a lot of Croat children actually had Serb grandfathers, and then there was the couple of two different castes who were hung from a tree by the upper of the two castes not too many years ago.

It all depends upon what diversity entails, does it not? If it means mutually clashing moral understandings and values, there won’t be enough harmony to generate trust.

I surely would trust folks more who shared those values, regardless of their ethnic or class origins.

I stopped believing what Rush puts out at the time of his Oxycontin addiction exposure. The hypocrisy was stunning, as shortly before he’d made his mega-ditto point of “locking up and throwing away the key” for drug offenders.

The Putnam effect is a big deal, but I think the guy writing the letter is making a big mistake but considering this issue as if there were alternatives to diversity. America blew its chance to be an all-WASP a long, long time ago when it built a big part of the Southern economy on slaves, and the Northern economy on cheap immigrant labor from Europe; later on America took in a lot of Chinese to work the railroads and Mexicans to work the fields, and then lots and lots of everybody else, too. Not to mention the Indians who survived and who were here first.

Segregation didn’t work as a strategy in the 50’s and 60’s and it certainly won’t work now. Trying to bring it back under a different name will only marginalize you. You can see this really clearly with Trump now; he gets a lot of white male voters, but he’s poisoned his chances with most other groups in the USA. That’s the future of white nationalism in this country — it’s no future at all.

So it’s America’s challenge to reap the advantages and minimize the disadvantages of diversity. Lots of countries have big challenges: Poland has no defensible borders, Russia is too big and too cold, China is too big and populous to manage properly and the whole Northern half of the country is too dry. Compared to most countries, America is in a wonderful position, with lots of resources and lots of allies. We can manage the challenges of diversity without starting a race war.

“laws, and then, all kinds of underhanded rules (down to the present day),to keep the black folks from moving in next door?”
“I don’t believe that an honest answer to this question will be approved by the moderator.”

Me: Well, the idea of race as a “partially inbred large extended family” is falsified by how people actually act

Never said families don’t fight. ? Look, “family” is not a scientific term, but it’s one everybody understands.

Well, as I learned long ago teaching physics, there are lots of terms (“force”, “power”, “energy”, etc.) that everybody understands; but the non-specialist meaning is so far from the technical usage as to be useless. To define “race” as a “big, slightly inbred family” stretches the meaning of “family” to the point of uselessness. As I said, it’s a bad heuristic.

As to family feuds, my point is this: Race realists tend to use the race-as-family trope in arguing for white solidarity (white nationalism, whatever). The point is that no such thing exists or ever has existed. You might have Bavarian solidarity vs. Prussian solidarity, or German vs. French, Protestant vs. Catholic, etc. Blacks and other minority groups show greater solidarity because they’re minorities. To get a majority (or even plurality) to do that is a difficult thing to accomplish. Race-as-family very evidently, based upon observation of what people actually do, can’t accomplish what race realists want it to.

Well, as I learned long ago teaching physics, there are lots of terms (“force”, “power”, “energy”, etc.) that everybody understands; but the non-specialist meaning is so far from the technical usage as to be useless

Those terms have scientific definitions; “family” does not, but that lack doesn’t negate the concept’s usefulness. But, fine, let’s try another word: affinity. Also unscientific, but with great import in human relations.

Race realists tend to use the race-as-family trope in arguing for white solidarity (white nationalism, whatever). The point is that no such thing exists or ever has existed

We’re talking about the American social/political context here. The term “white” carries — and has carried since colonial times — an understanding here that it has not necessarily carried in European history. (Just as “black” means something in America it does not necessarily mean in the West African lands whence came most of the ancestors of today’s African-Americans, what with the local tribal, linguistic, and religious divisions.) The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to “free white persons” — not merely Englishmen, but deliberately excluding non-racially-European people. The laws banning interracial marriage prohibited unions of whites and blacks, but not, e.g., Anglo-Saxons and Irish.

Blacks and other minority groups show greater solidarity because they’re minorities. To get a majority (or even plurality) to do that is a difficult thing to accomplish

But who perceives themselves as “minorities” in our cultural and political context? Pale-skinned Marco Rubio is a “minority” and “diverse,” while some equally pale fellow whose ancestors were from any European country (except maybe Spain or Portugal — then you get counted as “Latino”) are white, and therefore non-diverse, part of the majority, and inherently suspect.

American whites do show political solidarity at times and places where they perceive a threat from non-whites — especially a threat which makes little distinction between “good” (liberal) and “bad” (conservative) whites. In 1993, a year after the LA riots, white voters of that city banded together to elect a white Republican mayor to replace the longtime black liberal incumbent, against an East Asian opponent who courted the black vote. NYC whites stood together to elect Giuliani and Bloomberg five times to crack down on mostly black and Hispanic crime rather than risk a return to the disarray of the (black) Dinkins years. And this isn’t even getting into the racial bloc voting of the South, especially Deep South, which cuts across lines of class and everything else (that is, not all white Southern Republicans are flaming right-wingers or poor country folk, but rather whites up and down the class scale, and of varying degrees of religiosity, fear handing control of government to a Democratic Party which caters to black interests, unless that party can put up a non-scary moderate white guy like that new governor of Rod’s Louisiana).

If people don’t naturally want to live among their own kind, why does the federal government have to pour millions into enforcement of ‘anti-discrimination’ law enforcement, equal housing law, etc.

That kind of enforcement requires a plaintiff with standing, that is, someone who wants to move somewhere or obtain a job, who offers a prima facie case they have been discriminated against. E.g., the nice middle class black couple with three children and two jobs who find the real estate agent is showing them run down homes on the “Negro” side of town at twice the price of nicer homes on the “white” side of town that also have “For Sale” signs in the yard.

I think the guy writing the letter is making a big mistake but considering this issue as if there were alternatives to diversity. America blew its chance to be an all-WASP a long, long time ago…

Laurelhurst speaks truth… and Turmarion caps it off very nicely. So-called “black” people would have almost no internal cohesion as a bloc, if they didn’t have a long history of the law and the dominant culture being openly and deliberately against them, meaning, they had to count on a fellow brown-skinned person to stand by them when nobody else would.

In the past America has had periods of heavy immigration followed by tightened laws and decreased immigration. This has worked well for us multiple times as it has granted the immigrants time to assimilate.

For those that want no immigration laws and national sovereignty should be careful what you wish for. A time to take a step back and realize you are on a non sustainable trajectory may be in order. I know it might be the in thing to do to bash whites (especially poor whites). But this isn’t Gawker. There is almost rioting in the streets already (not by whites but it might be coming 10-20 years from now with this trajectory we are on).

The dismantling of the police is already happening before our eyes. Crime is rising and police morale is unprecedented low rates.

The rich want to open the borders to the overpopulated third-world, so that wages can be driven down to the level of Mexico or Vietnam and the rich can get even richer. But that doesn’t sound very good. So instead of talking about forced population increases and the effects on wages, rents, etc., let’s instead call it ‘diversity’ and claim that anyone opposed to jamming a billion people into this nation before the turn of the century hates people specifically, i.e., the only reason to oppose massive population increases is racism.

If you see my post above, we have pretty clear evidence that that is basically what is happening. Not in the conspiratorial sense, but that immigration overwhelmingly benefits the rich and harms employees (and it won’t just be the working class, but any salary earner). Those disparate incentives will split the two groups on the issue for the most part, and the rich will justify the exploitation in indirect and entirely bankrupt terms, like “diversity” and “racism”. It is a sequence of predictable smokescreens to hide what is really going on.

Re: The dismantling of the police is already happening before our eyes. Crime is rising…

Um, no. In fact: NO. Crime rates (with fluctuations) have been FALLING not rising. And the general complaint with the police is that they go overboard not that they are not doing their job. (To be sure most policemen and women are decent folks doing a difficult job. The venal and/or brutal ones are a small minority– albeit the old saying about a few rotten apples holds true. But We The People have every right, and indeed the duty, to make sure those who serve us do not get out of control)

Michael Guarino is right – employers like open immigration so they can pay less to everybody. My state admits lots of foreign students to State U because they’ll pay full tuition, and my state has cut taxes so it can’t fund education any more. Then my employer sponsors them for a work visa because they’ll work for cheaper and stay longer than Americans. Both these policies benefit the wealthy, and harm the average Kansan, but since my state is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, we don’t have a say.
But there are other immigrants here, like the post-Vietnam immigrants of the 1970’s, who are American citizens, and whose children and grandchildren were born here. They’re not going anywhere, and the immigrant-bashing and diversity-complaining harms them. People talk as if all immigration is illegal, which is far from the truth. What we should be talking about is what immigrants should we allow – family reuniting, for example, but not cheap software developers?
There have been more illegal immigrants leaving than entering the US in recent years, so building a wall would actually be counter-productive in that sense.
Immigration is a complex issue, which is why we have a complex bill held up in Congress where nobody wants to vote on it. It’s easier to make it simple slogans that get people riled up.

I recognize this thread is dead, but I don’t check this site that often. I am one of those highly educated, liberal on social issues, non-religious white people that value ethnic and racial diversity, which you guys criticize so much. My friends come from all over the world and are many different shades, but that doesn’t mean we are diverse. We aren’t really. We are all highly educated, science and data driven, and not particularly religious. We have more in common with each other, than we do with people from the rural areas or the inner cities of the places we are from. We all feel like aliens when we are back in those communities. People do seek their own kind. However, what that means may have nothing to do with location, nationality, or skin color. I don’t understand why ‘my kind’ would have anything to do with skin color. In fact, when I was in a racially diverse High School out west, it was lower class whites who used to beat me up, because I was a nerd. They aren’t ‘my kind’. We don’t think alike. We don’t live our lives the same way. I have nothing in common with those people. I honestly don’t see much of a difference, culturally, between lower class whites and lower class blacks. They listen to different types of music, dress in different clothes, and use different slang, but they have the same negative attitudes about education. Both types of communities have higher substance abuse, more violence, more out of wedlock births, more splintered families, more crime, and paradoxically more religiousity. Among my US born friends, I have those whose families come from the inner city ghettos and those from completely white trailer parks. I’ve spend time with both families. They were dysfunctional in similar ways. I see a distinction without a difference.

What we should be talking about is what immigrants should we allow – family reuniting, for example, but not cheap software developers?

What immigrants, and also how many, and from where. Also, of course, America is not the world, and there are plenty of other countries which haven’t yet gone down the same path as we have, and have a chance to decide whether they want to avoid it.

So it’s America’s challenge to reap the advantages and minimize the disadvantages of diversity. Lots of countries have big challenges: Poland has no defensible borders, Russia is too big and too cold, China is too big and populous to manage properly and the whole Northern half of the country is too dry. Compared to most countries, America is in a wonderful position, with lots of resources and lots of allies. We can manage the challenges of diversity without starting a race war.

There have been a lot of good comments in this thread, but this is probably the best. I’d disagree with Russia being too cold (it is certainly too big, but I rather like cold weather), but in general you’re right. America is a diverse society and always has been, for good and for ill. The flip side of course is that what’s right for America may not be right for other countries. Liberal democracy may suit Americans relatively well but be terribly suited for Russians, and the same with open immigration policies. The big question now is whether we want to pressure the rest of the world into following our lead.

I mentioned this point before, but Eamus Catuli often talks about how nice his life is: well, he chose to move to a very non-diverse country, which is now in the process of being bullied by Germany and others into becoming more diverse. I would ask Eamus, and others in the same situation: if open borders, diversity and mass immigration are unqualified goods, as opposed to things with their own sets of costs and benefits, then are you prepared to give up the things that makes the country you enjoy so much what it is? What would be gained exactly by the Czech Republic becoming more like America, the country you chose to leave behind?

This is why, at this point, even though I live in America, I care much less about American immigration policy than I do those of European countrys.

I honestly don’t see much of a difference, culturally, between lower class whites and lower class blacks. They listen to different types of music, dress in different clothes, and use different slang, but they have the same negative attitudes about education.

They are also the largest reservoir of mass support for “sticking to your own kind” (by race), whether “stop acting white” or “stay away from those n*****s”) because that is what gives all the thugs their cover. They do get some intellectual support from Noah and M_Young, but they don’t actually associate with such people.

I mentioned this point before, but Eamus Catuli often talks about how nice his life is: well, he chose to move to a very non-diverse country, which is now in the process of being bullied by Germany and others into becoming more diverse. I would ask Eamus, and others in the same situation: if open borders, diversity and mass immigration are unqualified goods, as opposed to things with their own sets of costs and benefits, then are you prepared to give up the things that makes the country you enjoy so much what it is? What would be gained exactly by the Czech Republic becoming more like America, the country you chose to leave behind?

Hector, on previous threads I have said that I am not against restrictionist policies, and that I think the people of a nation — whether in Europe or the Americas — have a right to decide what kind and level of immigration they think is in their best interests. I completely agree that this is a question of costs and benefits, not “unqualified goods.” So you’re directing this at the wrong guy.

Also, yes, Germany does tend to bigfoot other European countries. It’s not their most appealing quality. They’ve gotten a bit better about it compared with 1914-45, though.

Thought that I’d put in my 40% of a nickel. It strikes me that diversity IS a great strength – but not the kind the usual suspects mean. To build a coherent economy, for instance, you need some people who like (or at least tolerate) working with numbers and other symbols, those who are willing to work with words, some with people, and still others with machines and other such objects. And there are many jobs, probably the majority of them in fact, that require a combination of two or more of these features. Diversity of taste is therefore essential to maximal satisfaction in any complex economy. The same could be said to have greater richness of choice in such things as literature, music, and cuisine. But the difference that I see with our professional diversity advocates is that a nation could be almost all one ethnicity, such as Japan, and still have a wide enough abundance of tastes to be in good social and economic shape. Indeed, I seriously doubt that ethnicity has much to do with it, in that any one such grouping, given sufficient numbers, will have more than enough diversity to prosper. But that is decidedly NOT what the diversity pros want to hear!